The 'Pizza Upskirt': Toward a New Pizzalogical Lexicon

Internally at Slice and on my Flickr photostream, this site has used the term pizza upskirt to denote the type of photograph you see here, but we have never called explicit attention to this terminologyuntil now.

Slice first realized the value of shooting pizza undersides while perusing this post on eGullet, which compared the chars on the bottom of slices from Di Fara, Grimaldi's, and Patsy's. Believe it or not, until then, we had never thought of offering our readers photographic evidence of crust char.

We liked the eGulleteers' idea but weren't that keen on the way the slices were presented, hanging tip down, perpendicular to the table or being lifted timidly with the serving spatula. Borrowing the eGullet idea but improving upon it by holding the slice tip up in the frame, we felt we were able to convey the same visual information while capturing the majestic nature of pizza as a cuisine. A slice, after all, should not hang tip down like the head of a chastised dog slinking away from its angry master; it should point proudly to the heavens, toward the culinary heights it seeks to attain.

Our first true pizza upskirt debuted on February 13, 2005, but it was not until August 2005 that our buddy Kathryn Yu commented on this photo on Flickr, "Can't help feeling like this is the equivalent of an 'upskirt' photograph, but for pizza."

From that point on, we have applied Kathryn's genius term to these shots, and now our photostream is full of them (64 to date). A handful of other pizza-loving Flickr members have warmed to the phrase as well.

The reason I'm highlighting this neologism is that on Friday Slice got Kottked and then Boing Boinged in regard to the term, with Boing Boing adding it to its handful of jargon watch words.

Slice certainly hopes that pizza upskirt catches on, though, honestly, we don't know how far its reach will be, given the very limited number of people who actually care what the underside of a piece of pizza looks like. Still, we encourage you, dear readers, to employ it as much as you can.

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About the Author

Adam Kuban is the proprietor of the pop-up Margot's Pizza, which serves bar-style pizza. But you may also know him as the founder of Slice (RIP, 2003–2014) where he has written thousands of blog posts about pizza. He also created A Hamburger Today and served as Serious Eats's founding editor (2006–2010) after having sold those sites to SE.

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